The English language, being free of all conventions and having no governing body, is a beautiful thing.  French is a carefully cultivated garden, but English?  As Shakespeare could tell you, all someone has to do to invent a new word is to get enough people to start using it.  That’s how d’oh joined the official lexicon last year, and how this year’s new addition, word number 1,000,000, might just end up being the word noob.

There are other options, of course, but the fact of the matter is adding a de- to words like defriend or defollow isn’t unusual, but adding a word invented in online games is a sign that the culture is changing.  No longer are words being invented by playwrights or author; average people like us can create a word, spread it amongst our friends, and (eventually) have it join the dictionary and be usable in Scrabble games throughout the world.  It’s kind of like an episode of Fraggle Rock I barely remember in which the Fraggles picked one person every year to add one new word to the Fraggle language.

Image:  Joystiq

Tags: new words, additions to the dictionary, new English, noob added to dictionary, one million words, language

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